Hardware

Digital Design & Computer Arch. - Lecture 22: Memory Organization & Memory Technology (Spring 2022)

Onur Mutlu Lectures
Onur Mutlu Lectures•Feb 13, 2026

Why It Matters

Memory and storage, not CPUs or GPUs, now constrain system performance and user-facing features; understanding memory technology and organization is therefore central to future hardware and software design. Progress in memory/SSDs will determine the practical limits of performance, power and application innovation.

Summary

In this lecture the professor shifts focus from processors to memory, arguing that memory and storage are the dominant bottlenecks in modern computing. He frames the discussion with Amdahl’s law to show why accelerating computation alone yields limited system speedups when memory dominates execution time. The course will spend the next lectures on memory organization and technologies—DRAM, SSDs/flash and related trade-offs—highlighting that memory advances have driven consumer device capabilities. The instructor also urges critical thinking about architectural paradigms and offers a short extra-credit reading on Amdahl’s paper.

Original Description

Digital Design and Computer Architecture, ETH Zürich, Spring 2022 (https://safari.ethz.ch/digitaltechnik/spring2022/)
Lecture 22: Memory Organization and Memory Technology
Lecturer: Professor Onur Mutlu (https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/)
Date: May 19, 2022
Recommended Reading:
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A Modern Primer on Processing in Memory
Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Computing Systems
RowHammer: A Retrospective
Fundamentally Understanding and Solving RowHammer
RECOMMENDED LECTURE VIDEOS & PLAYLISTS:
========================================
Computer Architecture Fall 2021 Lectures Playlist:
Digital Design and Computer Architecture Spring 2021 Livestream Lectures Playlist:
Featured Lectures:
Interview with Professor Onur Mutlu:
The Story of RowHammer Lecture:
Accelerating Genome Analysis Lecture:
Memory-Centric Computing Systems Tutorial at IEDM 2021:
Intelligent Architectures for Intelligent Machines Lecture:
Computer Architecture Fall 2020 Lectures Playlist:
Digital Design and Computer Architecture Spring 2020 Lectures Playlist:
Public Lectures by Onur Mutlu, Playlist:
Computer Architecture at Carnegie Mellon Spring 2015 Lectures Playlist:
Rethinking Memory System Design Lecture @stanfordonline :

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